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Benjamin  B.  Warfleld 


The  Ganon  of  the  Nev;  Testament 


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The  Canon 


OF  TH.'^  S 


New  Testament 


'  BY   THc 

Rev.  BENJ.  B.  WARFIELD,  D.D.,  LL.  D. 


1892 


*      POT   ^  1922      * 

THE  CANON 

OF  THE 

NEW  TESTAMENT: 


HOW  AND  WHEN  FORMED. 


v/      BY  THE 

REV.  BENJ.  B.  WARFIELD,  D.  D.,  LL.  D. 

Professor  in  Princeton  Theological  Seminary. 


PHILADELPHIA: 

THE  AMERICAN  SUNDAY-SCHOOL  UNION, 

1 1 22  Chestnut  Street; 

New  York  :  8  &  id  Bible  House. 

[Copyright,  1892,  by  The  American  Sunday-School  Union.] 


The  Formation  of  the  Canon  of  the 
New  Testaient 


In  order  to  obtain  a  correct  understanding  of  what 
is  called  the  formation  of  the  Canon  of  the  New  Tes- 
tament, it  is  necessary  to  begin  by  fixing  very  firmly 
in  our  minds  one  fact  which  is  obvious  enough  when 
attention  is  once  called  to  it.  That  is,  that  the  Chris- 
tian church  did  not  require  to  form  for  itself  the  idea 
of  a  *'  canon," — or,  as  we  should  more  commonly 
call  it,  of  a  **  Bible," — that  is,  of  a  collection  of 
books  given  of  God  to  be  the  authoritative  rule  of 
faith  and  practice.  It  inherited  this  idea  from  the 
Jewish  church,  along  with  the  thing  itself,  the  Jewish 
Scriptures,  or  the  "  Canon  of  the  Old  Testament." 
The  church  did  not  grow  up  by  natural  law  :  it  was 
founded.  And  the  authoritative  teachers  sent  forth 
by  Christ  to  found  his  church,  carried  with  them, 
as  their  most  precious  possession,  a  body  of  divine 
Scriptures,  which  they  imposed  on  the  church  that 
they  founded  as  its  code  of  law.     No  reader  of  the 

(3) 


4  FORMATION   OF   N.    T.    CANON. 

New  Testament  can  need  proof  of  this ;  on  every 
page  of  that  book  is  spread  the  evidence  that  from 
the  very  beginning  the  Old  Testament  was  as  cor- 
dially recognized  as  law  by  the  Christian  as  by  the  Jew. 
The  Christian  church  thus  was  never  without  a  ''  Bi- 
ble" or  a  "  canon." 

But  the  Old  Testament  books  were  not  the  only 
ones  which  the  apostles  (by  Christ's  own  appointment 
the  authoritative  founders  of  the  church)  imposed 
upon  the  infant  churches,  as  their  authoritative  rule 
of  faith  and  practice.  No  more  authority  dwelt  in 
the  prophets  of  the  old  covenant  than  in  themselves, 
the  apostles,  who  had  been  '*made  sufficient  as  min- 
isters of  a  new  covenant;"  for  (as  one  of  themselves 
argued)  *'  if  that  which  passeth  away  was  with  glory, 
much  more  that  v/hich  remaineth  is  in  glory."  Ac- 
cordingly not  only  was  the  gospel  they  delivered,  in 
their  own  estimation,  itself  a  divine  revelation,  but  it 
was  also  preached  "  in  the  Holy  Ghost  "  (i  Pet.  i  : 
12) ;  not  merely  the  matter  of  it,  but  the  very  words 
in  which  it  was  clothed  were  "  of  the  Holy  Spirit " 
(i  Cor.  2:  13).  Their  own  commands  were,  there- 
fore, of  divine  authority  (i  Thess.  4:  2),  and  their 
writings  were  the  depository  of  these  commands  (2 
Thess.  2:15).  *'  If  any  man  obeyeth  not  our  word 
by  this  epistle,"  says  Paul  to  one  church  (2  Thess.  3  : 
14),  "  note  that  man,  that  ye  have  no  company  with 
him."  To  another  he  makes  it  the  test  of  a  Spirit- 
led  man  to  recognize  that  what  he  was  writing  to 
them  was  **  the  commandments  of  the  Lord"  (i 
Cor.  14:  37).     Inevitably,  such  writings,  making  so 


FORMATION   OF   N.    T.    CANON.  5 

awful  a  claim  on  their  acceptance,  were  received  by 
tlie  infant  churches  as  of  a  quality  equal  to  that  of 
the  old  ''Bible;"  placed  alongside  of  its  older  books 
as  an  additional  part  of  the  one  law  of  God ;  and 
read  as  such  in  their  meetings  for  worship — a  prac- 
tice which  moreover  was  required  by  the  apostles 
(i  Thess.  5  :  27;  Col.  4  :  i6;  Rev.  i  :  2).  In  the 
apprehension,  therefore,  of  the  earliest  churches,  the 
"Scriptures"  were  not  a  closed  but  an  increasing 
*'  canon."  Such  they  had  been  from  the  beginning, 
as  they  gradually  grew  in  number  from  Moses  to  Mal- 
achi ;  and  such  they  were  to  continue  as  long  as  there 
should  remain  among  the  churches  ''  men  of  God 
who  spake  as  they  were  moved  by  the  Holy  Ghost." 

We  say  that  this  immediate  placing  of  the  new  ^ 

books — given  the  church  under  the  seal  of  apostolic 
authority — among  the  Scriptures  already  established 
as  such,  was  inevitable.  It  is  also  historically  evinced 
from  the  very  beginning.  Thus  the  apostle  Peter, 
writing  in  a.  d.  68,  speaks  of  Paul's  numerous  letters 
not  in  contrast  with  the  Scriptures,  but  as  among  the 
Scriptures  and  in  contrast  with  **  the  olher  Scriptures  " 
(2  Pet.  3  :  16) — that  is,  of  course,  those  of  the  Old 
Testament.  In  like  manner  the  apostle  Paul  com- 
bines, as  if  it  were  the  most  natural  thing  in  the 
world,  the  book  of  Deuteronomy  and  the  Gospel  of 
Luke  under  the  common  head  of  ''Scripture"  (i 
Tim.  5  :  18):  "  For  the  Scripture  saith.  Thou  shalt 
not  muzzle  the  ox  when  he  treadeth  out  the  corn 
[Deut.  25  :  4;]  and,  The  laborer  is  worthy  of  his 
hire '  "  (Luke  10  :  7).     The  line  of  such  quotations  is 


6  FORMATION    OF    N.    T.    CANON. 

never  broken  in  Christian  literature.  Polycarp  (c.12) 
in  A.  D.  115  unites  the  Psalms  and  Ephesians  in  ex- 
actly similar  manner:  ^'In  the  sacred  books,  . 
as  it  is  said  in  these  Scriptures,  '  Be  ye  angry  and  sin 
not,'  and  'Let  not  the  sun  go  down  upon  your 
wrath.'  "  So,  a  few  years  later,  the  so-called  second 
letter  of  Clement,  after  quoting  Isaiah,  adds  (2  :  4)  : 
*'  And  another  Scripture,  however,  says,  '  I  came  not 
to  call  the  righteous,  but  sinners'" — quoting  from 
Matthew,  a  book  which  Barnabas  {circa  97-106  A. 
D.)  had  already  adduced  as  Scripture.  After  this 
such  quotations  are  common. 

What  needs  emphasis  at  present  about  these  facts  is 
that  they  obviously  are  not  evidences  of  a  gradually- 
heightening  estimate  of  the  New  Testament  books, 
originally  received  on  a  lower  level  and  just  begin- 
ning to  be  tentatively  accounted  Scripture  ;  they  are 
conclusive  evidences  rather  of  the  estimation  of  the 
New  Testament  books  from  the* very  beginning  as. 
Scripture,  and  of  their  attachment  as  Scripture  to  the 
other  Scriptures  already  in  hand.  The  early  Chris- 
tians did  not,  then,  first  form  a  rival  ''canon"  of 
"new  books"  which  came  only  gradually  to  be  ac- 
counted as  of  equal  divinity  and  authority  with  the 
"old  books";  they  received  new  book  after  new 
book  from  the  apostolical  circle,  as  equally  "  Scrip- 
ture "  with  the  old  books,  and  added  them  one  by 
one  to  the  collection  of  old  books  as  additional  Scrip- 
tures, until  at  length  the  new  books  thus  added  were 
numerous  enough  to  be  looked  upon  as  another  .$-^^//^« 
of  the  Scriptures. 


FORMATION    OF    N.    T.    CANON.  f 

The  earliest  name  given  to  this  new  section  of 
Scripture  was  framed  on  the  model  of  the  name  by 
which  what  we  know  as  the  Old  Testament  was  then 
known.  Just  as  it  was  called  "The  Law  and  the 
Prophets  and  the  Psalms  "  (or  '*  the  Hagiographa  "), 
or  more  briefly  "The  Law  and  the  Prophets,"  or 
even  more  briefly  still  "  The  Law ;  "  so  the  enlarged 
Bible  was  called  "  The  Law  and  the  Prophets,  with 
the  Gospels  and  the  Apostles  "  (so  Clement  of  Alex- 
andria, Strom,  vi.  ii  :  88;  TertuUian,  De  Frees, 
Hcer.  36),  or  most  briefly  "  The  Law  and  the  Gos- 
pel "  (so  Claudius  Apolinaris,  Irenseus);  while  the  new 
books  apart  were  called  ' '  The  Gospel  and  the  Apos- 
tles," or  most  briefly  of  all  "The  Gospel."  This 
earliest  name  for  the  new  Bible,  with  all  that  it  in- 
volves as  to  its  relation  to  the  old  and  briefer  Bible, 
is  traceable  as  far  back  as  Ignatius  (a.  d.  115),  who 
makes  use  of  it  repeatedly  {e.  g.,  ad  Philad.  5  ; 
ad  Sinyrn.  7).  In  one  passage  he  gives  us  a  hint  of 
the  controversies  which  the  enlarged  Bible  of  the 
Christians  aroused  among  the  Judaizers  {ad  Philad. 
6).  "When  I  heard  some  saying,"  he  writes, 
"  '•  Unless  I  find  it  in  the  Old  {_Books\  I  will  not  be- 
lieve the  Gospel,'  on  my  saying,  'It  is  written,'  they 
answered,  'That  is  the  question.'  To  me,  however, 
Jesus  Christ  is  the  Old  [Books]  ;  his  cross  and  death 
and  resurrection,  and  the  faith  which  is  by  him,  the 
undefiled  Old  [Books] — by  which  I  wish,  by  your 
prayers,  to  be  justified.  The  priests  indeed  are  good, 
but  the  High  Priest  better,"  etc.  Here  Ignatius  ap- 
peals to  the  "  Gospel  "  as  Scripture,  and  the  Judaizers 


8  FORMATION   OF   N.    T.    CANON 

object,  receiving  from  him  the  answer  in  effect  which 
Augustine  afterward  formulated  in  the  well-known 
saying  that  the  New  Testament  lies  hidden  in  the  Old 
and  the  Old  Testament  Is  first  made  clear  in  the 
New.  What  we  need  now  to  observe,  however,  is 
that  to  Ignatius  the  New  Testament  was  not  a  dif- 
erent  book  from  the  Old  Testament,  but  part  of  the 
one  body  of  Scripture  with  it ;  an  accretion,  so  to 
speak,  which  had  grown  upon  it. 

This  is  the  testimony  of  all  thp  early  witnesses — 
even  those  which  speak  for  the  distinctively  Jewish- 
Christian  church.  For  example,  that  curious  Jewish- 
Christian  writing  The  Testaments  of  the  XII.  Patri- 
archs (Benj.  ii)  tells  us,  under  the  cover  of  an  ex 
post  facto  prophecy,  that  the  ^*  work  and  word  "  of 
Paul,  i.  e.,  confessedly  the  book  of  Acts  and  Paul's 
epistles,  **  shall  be  written  in  the  Holy  Books,"  /.  <?., 
as  is  understood  by  all,  made  a  part  of  the  existent 
Bible.  So  even  in  the  Talmud,  in  a  scene  intended 
to  ridicule  a  *'  bishop  "  of  the  first  century,  he  is  rep- 
resented as  finding  Galatians  by  "  sinking  himself 
deeper  "  into  the  same  **  Book  "  which  contained  the 
Law  of  Moses  {Babl.  Shabbath,  ii6  a  and  b).  The 
details  cannot  be  entered  into  here.  Let  it  suffice  to 
say  that,  from  the  evidence  of  the  fragments  which 
alone  have  been  preserved  to  us  of  the  Christian 
writings  of  that  very  early  time,  it  appears  that  from 
the  beginning  of  the  second  century  (and  that  is  from 
the  end  of  the  apostolic  age)  a  collection  (Ignatius, 
2  Clement)  of  *'New  Books"  (Ignatius),  called  the 
"Gospel   and   Apostles  "  (Ignatius,  Marcion),    was 


FORMATION   OF   N.    T.    CANON.  9 

already  a  part  of  the  '^  Oracles  "  of  God  (Polycarp, 
Papias,  2  Clement),  or  *' Scriptures "  (i  Tim.,  2 
Pet.,  Barn.,  Polycarp,  2  Clement),  or  the  *'  Holy 
Books"  or  ''Bible"  (Testt.  XII.  Patt.). 

The  number  of  books  included  in  this  added  body 
of  New  Books,  at  the  opening  of  the  second  century, 
cannot  be  satisfactorily  determined  by  the  evidence 
of  these  fragments  alone.  The  section  of  it  called 
the  ''Gospel"  included  Gospels  written  by  "  the 
apostles  and  their  companions"  (Justin),  which  be- 
yond legitimate  question  were  our  four  Gospels 
now  received.  The  section  called  "the  Apostles" 
contained  the  book  of  Acts  (The  Testt.  XII.  Patt.) 
and  epistles  of  Paul,  John,  Peter  and  James.  The 
evidence  from  various  quarters  is  indeed  enough  to 
show  that  the  collection  in  general  use  contained  all 
the  books  which  we  at  present  receive,  with  the  pos- 
sible exceptions  of  Jude,  2  and  3  John  and  Philemon. 
And  it  is  more  natural  to  suppose  that  failure  of  very 
early  evidence  for  these  brief  booklets  is  due  to  their 
insignificant  size  rather  than  to  their  non-acceptance. 

It  is  to  be  borne  in  mind,  however,  that  the  extent 
of  the  collection  may  have — and  indeed  is  historic- 
ally shown  actually  to  have — varied  in  different  local- 
ities. The  Bible  was  circulated  only  in  hand-copies, 
slowly  and  painfully  made  ;  and  an  incomplete  copy, 
obtained  say  at  Ephesus  in  a.  d.  68,  would  be  likely 
to  remain  for  many  years  the  Bible  of  the  church  to 
which  it  was  conveyed ;  and  might  indeed  become 
the  parent  of  other  copies,  incomplete  like  itself,  and 
thus  the  means  of  providing  a  whole  district  with  in- 


10  FORMATION   OF   N.    T.    CANON. 

complete  Bibles.  Thus,  when  we  inquire  after  the 
history  of  the  New  Testament  Canon  we  need  to  dis- 
tinguish such  questions  as  these  :  (i)  When  was  the 
New  Testament  Canon  completed?  (2)  When  did 
anyone  church  acquire  a  completed  canon?  (3) 
When  did  the  completed  canon — the  complete  Bible 
— obtain  universal  circulation  and  acceptance  ?  (4) 
On  what  ground  and  evidence  did  the  churches  with 
incomplete  Bibles  accept  the  remaining  books  when 
they  were  made  known  to  them  ? 

The  Canon  of  the  New  Testament  was  completed 
when  the  last  authoritative  book  was  given  to  any 
church  by  the  apostles,  and  that  was  when  John 
wrote  the  Apocalypse,  about  a.  d.  98.  Whether  the 
church  of  Ephesus,  however,  had  a  completed  Canon 
when  it  received  the  Apocalypse,  or  not,  would  de- 
pend on  whether  there  was  any  Epistle,  say  that  of 
Jude,  which  had  not  yet  reached  it  with  authenti- 
cating proof  of  its  apostolicity.  There  is  room  for 
historical  investigation  here.  Certainly  the  whole 
Canon  was  not  universally  received  by  the  churches 
till  somewhat  later.  The  Latin  church  of  the  second 
and  third  centuries  did  not  quite  know  what  to  do 
with  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews.  The  Syrian 
churches  for  some  centuries  may  have  lacked  the 
lesser  of  the  Catholic  Epistles  and  Revelation.  But 
from  the  time  of  Irenseus  down,  the  church  at  large 
had  the  whole  Canon  as  we  now  possess  it.  And 
though  a  section  of  the  church  may  hot  yet  have  been 
satisfied  of  the  apostolicity  of  a  certain  book  or  of 
certain  books  j  and   though  afterwards  doubts  may 


FORMATION    OF   N.    T.    CANON.  11 

have  arisen  in  sections  of  the  church  as  to  the  apos- 
tolicity  of  certain  books  (as  e.  g.  of  Revelation):  yet 
in  no  case  was  it  more  than  a  respectable  minority  of 
the  church  which  was  slow  in  receiving,  or  which 
came  afterward  to  doubt,  the  credentials  of  any  of 
the  books  that  then  as  now  constituted  the  Canon  of 
the  New  Testament  accepted  by  the  church  at  large. 
And  in  every  case  the  principle  on  which  a  book  was 
accepted,  or  doubts  against  it  laid  aside,  was  the  his- 
torical tradition  of  apostolicity. 

Let  it,  however,  be  clearly  understood  that  it  was 
not  exactly  apostolic  authoi^ship  which  in  the  estima- 
tion of  the  earliest  churches,  constituted  a  book  a 
portion  of  the  "canon."  Apostolic  authorship  was, 
indeed,  early  confounded  with  canonicity.  It  was 
doubt  as  the  apostolic  authorship  of  Hebrews,  in  the 
West,  and  of  James  and  Jude,  apparently,  which  un- 
derlay the  slowness  of  the  inclusion  of  these  books  in 
the  "canon"  of  certain  churches.  But  from  the  be- 
ginning it  was  not  so.  The  principle  of  canonicity 
was  not  apostolic  authorship,  but  wipositton  by  the 
apostles  as  "  /aw.^'  Hence  TertuUian's  name  for  the 
*'  canon  "  is  "  instrumentimi  "  ;  and  bespeaks  of  the 
Old  and  New  Instrument  as  we  would  of  the  Old  and 
New  Testament.  That  the  apostles  so  imposed  the 
Old  Testament  on  the  churches  which  they  founded 
— as  their  "  Instrument,"  or  "  Law,"  or  "Canon  " — 
can  be  denied  by  none.  And  in  imposing  new  books 
on  the  same  churches,  by  the  same  apostolical  author- 
ity, they  did  not  confine  themselves  to  books  of  their 
own   composition.     It   is  the   Gospel  according  to 


12  FORMATION    OF   N.    T.    CANON. 

Luke,  a  man  who  was  not  an  apostle,  which  Paul 
parallels  in  i  Tim.  5  :  i8  with  Deuteronomy  as 
/  equally  *'  Scripture  "  with  it,  in  the  first  extant  quo- 
tation of  a  New  Testament  book  as  Scripture.  The 
Gospels  which  constituted  the  first  division  of  the 
New  Books, — of  ''The  Gospel  and  the  Apostles," — 
Justin  tells  us,  were  "  written  by  the  apostles  and 
their  companions."  The  authority  of  the  apostles,  as 
by  divine  appointment  founders  of  the  church,  was 
embodied  in  whatever  books  they  imposed  on  the 
church  as  law,  not  merely  in  those  they  themselves 
had  written. 

The  early  churches,  in  short,  received,  as  we  re- 
ceive, into  their  New  Testament  all  the  books  histor- 
ically evinced  to  them  as  given  by  the  apostles  to  the 
churches  as  their  code  of  law  ;  and  we  must  not  mis- 
take the  historical  evidences  of  the  slow  circulation 
and  authentication  of  these  books  over  the  widely- 
extended  church,  for  evidence  of  slowness  of  ''can- 
onization "  of  books  by  the  authority  or  the  taste  of 
the  church  itself. 

Princeton,  N.  J. 


Date  Due 

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PAMPHLET  BINDER 

Syrocuse,  N.    Y. 
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BS1135.W27 

The  canon  of  the  New  Testament :  how  and 


Princeton  Theological  Seminary-Speer  Library 


1   1012  00038  2996 


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